“Do you think there might be a new plague?” he asked mildly. “Might this para-DNA invader throw up something just as nasty as the old meiotic disrupters and chiasmalytic transformers?”

“That’s extremely unlikely,” she answered, just as mildly. “So far as we can tell, para-DNA is entirely harmless. Organisms of this kind will inevitably compete for resources with life as we know it, but there’s no evidence at all of any other kind of dangerous interaction and it would be surprising if there were. Para-DNA is just something which happened to drift into the biosphere from elsewhere—almost certainly from the outer solar system, in my opinion. It’s fascinating, but it’s unlikely to pose any serious threat.”

“Are you absolutely sure of that?” Damon asked, watching the luminous eyes.

“You know perfectly well that there’s no absolute certainty in science, Damon,” Eveline answered equably. “Investigations of this kind have to be carried out very carefully, and we have to wait until we have all the data in place before we draw our ultimate conclusions. All I can say is that there’s no reason at present to believe that para-DNA is or could be dangerous.”

“Of course,” Damon said in a neutral tone. “I do understand that. It’s interesting, though, isn’t it? A whole new basis of life. Who knows what it might have produced, out there in the vast wilderness of space? I asked Karol whether it might be the gateway to a whole set of new biotech tools. Have you had much interest from the corps?”

“A little,” Eveline said, “but I really can’t concern myself with that sort of thing. This isn’t a matter of commerce, Damon—it’s far more important than that. It’s a matter of enlightenment. I really wish you understood that—but you never did care much for enlightenment, did you?”

There had been a time when a dig like that would have stung him, but Damon felt that she was fully entitled. He was even prepared to consider the possibility that she might be right.

“A lot of people will be interested,” he predicted, “even if there are no fortunes to be made. The corps will want to investigate the possibilities themselves. Para-DNA doesn’t actually belongto you, after all. If you’re right about its origins, it’s just one more aspect of the universe—everybody’s business.”

“Yes it is,” she agreed, looking sideways at the window which offered them both a view of the magnificent starfield. “ Everybody’sbusiness. Anything we discover will be freely available to anyone and everyone. We’re not profit minded.”

“Nor is the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Damon observed. “You and they have that in common—but I met a corpsman not long ago who contended that even the corps aren’t really profit motivated anymore. He suggested to me that the Age of Capital was dead, and that the New Utopia’s megacorps have a new agenda.”

“The problem with corporation people,” Eveline said, with the firmness of committed belief, “is that you can never believe a word they say. It’s all advertising and attention seeking. Science is different. Science is interested in the truth, however prosaic it might be.” Again she looked sideways at the star field, which was not in the least prosaic, even in the context of the virtual environment.

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?” Damon pointed out. “After all, you’ve given a lifetime to the pursuit of scientific truth, dull and otherwise. But I will try to understand, Eveline. I think I’m beginning to see the light. I wish you luck with your inquiries—and I hope that the kind of misfortune which seems so rife down here can’t reach out as far as Lagrange-Five.”

“I hope so too,” Eveline assured him. “Take care, Damon. In spite of our past disagreements, we all loved you and we still do. We’d really like to have you back one day, when you’ve got all the nonsense out of your system.” Her eyes were still uncommonly bright. They shone more vividly than he’d ever seen them shine before, or ever thought likely—but they didn’t shine as brightly or as implacably as the stars that she could always look out upon, whether she were in her actual laboratory or its virtual simulation.

I know you’d like to have me back, Damon thought. I only wish you weren’t so certain that there’s nothing else I can do. All he said out loud was: “I’ll be careful. Don’t worry about me, Eveline. I understand that you’ve got more important things to do.”

After he’d broken the connection Damon found that two images still lingered in his mind’s eye: Eveline’s eyes, and the star field at which she’d glanced on more than one occasion. Eveline wasn’t one for idle sidelong glances; he knew that she’d been trying to make a point. He even thought he knew what point it was that she had been trying to make—but it was just a guess. Beset by confusions as he was, there was nothing he could do but guess. Unfortunately, he had no idea what reward there might be in guessing correctly, nor what penalty there might be if he jumped to the wrong conclusion.

In a way, the most horrible thought of all was that it might not matter in the least what he came to believe, or what he tried to do about it. The one thing he wanted more than to be safe and sound was to be relevant. He wanted to be something more than Catherine Praill; he wanted a part to play that might make a difference, not merely to his own ambitions but to those of his foster parents and those of the stubbornly mysterious kidnappers. If there were people in the world who thought it possible, reasonable, and desirable to play God, how could any young man who was genuinely ambitious be content to play a lesser role?

Twenty-one

M

adoc Tamlin waited patiently while Harriet, alias Tithonia, alias the Old Lady, watched the VE tape that he’d found on the badly burned body. She sat perfectly still except for her hands, which made very slight movements, as if she were a pianist responding reflexively to some inordinately complicated nocturne that she had to memorize.

Madoc knew that the Old Lady was concentrating very intently, because she wasn’t just watching the recording; she was also watching the code that reproduced it, whizzing past in a virtual display-within-the-display. Over the years, Harriet had built up a strange kind of sensitivity to code patterns which allegedly allowed her to detect the artificial bridges used to link, fill in, and distort the “natural” sequences generated by digitizing camera work.

Madoc had never been admitted into Harriet’s lair before; on the rare occasions when they’d met they’d done so on neutral ground. She’d made an exception this time, but not because he was on the run from the LAPD after clobbering one of their finest with a crowbar. She’d let him in because she was interestedin the business he’d got mixed up in.

That was quite a compliment, although Madoc knew that it was a compliment to Damon rather than to him. It was Damon’s mystery, after all; he was only the legman.

In order to get into the Old Lady’s lair he’d had to undergo all the old pulp-fiction rituals: a blindfold ride in a car, followed by a blindfold descent into the depths of some ancient ruin in the Hollywood hills. Most people still avoided Hollywood, associating it with the spectacular outbreak of the Second Plague War rather than the long-extinct film industry, but Harriet wasn’t like most people. There were hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of centenarians in the USNA, but she was nevertheless unique.

Most people who lived to be a hundred had bought into IT in the early days; the brake had been put on their aging processes when they were in their thirties or forties, way back in the 2120s. No one knew exactly what Harriet had been doing in those days, but it certainly hadn’t been honest or profitable. She’d been part of the underclass that had absorbed all the shit flying off the fan of the genetic revolution. In the previous century her kind had provided both plague wars with the greater part of their virus fodder, but Harriet had been born just late enough to miss the longest-delayed effects of those conflicts. Circumstances had dictated, however, that she continue to age at what used to be the natural rate until she was well into her seventies and the calendar was well into the 2150s. Apart from the usual wear and tear she’d had multiple cancers of an unusually obdurate kind—the kind that didn’t respond to all the usual treatments. Then she’d been picked up by PicoCon as a worst-case guinea pig for the field trials of a brand-new fleet of nanomachines.